The Gulf of the Poets

Napoleon himself defined this gulf as the most beautiful in the entire universe and the Italian poet Sem Benelli, who wrote one of his masterpieces in 1910 while staying in Lerici, first termed this place “the Gulf of the Poets”, as to remind and confirm its undeniable lure on intellectuals and writers.

Throughout the centuries, many intellectuals and artists came to pay a visit to this place: the writer D. H. Lawrence, the writer and painter G. Sand, the talented Henry James, the Italian Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale, and the writer P. B. Shelley with his family, whose wife was Frankenstein’s author, Mary Shelley.

The Shelly family, falling in love with this place, decided to move to San Terenzo and they lived in the villa that today is known as Villa Shelley. Their masterpieces may have taken inspiration also from the atmosphere of these places.

Besides the city of La Spezia, positioned right at the center of the gulf, Portovenere with its three isles and Lerici are the two major towns facing the sea. In the 70’s, the connection service between Portovenere and the Cinque Terre began to be operational and in 1979 the boat service across the whole gulf turned this area into one of the absolute favorites for locals and tourists.